This morning we paid a visit to an EVN facility on the outskirts of Plovdiv. Compared to what we’ve seen so far,it’s huge. On the ground floor there are workshops, where large-scale equipment,  transformers, generators and the like are repaired and obsolete items are stripped down to their basics for spares and scrap. Out in the yard there are vintage vehicles from the GDR, lorries from some COMECON barter worked out by bureaucrats in Sofia.
Some of the vehicles seem to have been reassigned from military duty, demobbed. For me they call to mind a ghost of the sixties when army and navy surplus equipment and uniforms offered cheap, hard-wearing clothing for students and workers. These were actually second-hand – stripped of the insignia of regiment, rank but leaving their unbleached outlines behind. Unlike the modern trend towards playing soldiers as a designer fashion statement, they also offered us added value: combined with long hair, brilliantly coloured shirts, and appropriate left-wing views it was like waving a red flag at those who considered the Union Jack and John Bull only marginally less holy than the bible. Many of the vehicles are now literally demobilised. |
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Then, in the parking space at the front of the building, we come across a huge black monster that gives the impression of being the offspring of a tank and a fifties Chevy, a post-war fraternisation before the full consequences of the Cold War came into effect. It turns out to be the official car of the Patriarch of Plovdiv, a 1957 Volga, still fully functional — heavy-duty representation.
Inside, where the old household electric meters are stored having been replaced by new ones from Siemens, the corridors reverberate with individual steps where once waves of buzz and clatter, made by hundreds of workers, tumbled through the corridors. |
